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"Assigning permissions" means granting users extra rights within the wiki software (or revoking these rights). This is done by going to the Special:UserRights page, and adding users into a "group" which has specific rights. The first thing to note however, is that this action requires special permissions itself!

Note that this help page describes the default MediaWiki configuration, but every aspect of permissions is highly customisable with server config settings. You may wish to rewrite this help page to reflect your wiki configuration

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Bureaucrats

By default, you will need to be a 'Bureaucrat' (in the 'Bureaucrat' group) before you can access the Special:UserRights page. Other users can always contact one of the bureaucrats to request a change of permissions. Find out who these people are at Special:ListUsers/bureaucrat.

Promoting users to Sysops and Bureaucrats

The Special:UserRights page allows you (if you have access) to set which groups a user is in. A common task would be to put a user into the 'Sysop' group. This will grant the user various extra rights, such as deleting pages, and blocking users. See Help:Sysops and permissions for more details.

Obviously giving a user such rights implies that you trust the user, both in terms of being non-malicious, and also as somebody with sufficient competence in using the wiki software, and in dealing with the wiki community. People hoping to become sysops should read Help:Sysops and permissions. However it should be noted that actions of a sysop user are (almost) entirely reversible, by other sysop users, and so it can be a good idea to assign these extra permissions to a number of users in order to

spread the workload of day-to-day sysop operations such as blocking vandals and deleting pages.

make things more democratic, and decrease any perception of a single dictator running the community

allow competent users the power they need to make progress with wiki refactoring.

reward valued contributors/community members

Processes

If you have many sysops, you may start to need documented processes governing their actions. e.g. when should a page be protected versus leaving it unprotected? You may even reach the point where you need a documented procedure for deciding who gets to be a sysop, and who should have their sysop rights revoked. To manage all of this, you may wish to promote several users into the 'Bureaucrat' group (a smaller number of your most trusted users) to spread the workload managing the promoting/demoting of sysops. On some large wikis, users are voted in by other users before they are granted extra permissions, and sysops have their rights revoked by a committee who investigate accusations of misconduct. Such processes are unlikely to be necessary in anything but the largest of wiki communities.

Other permissions

Beyond promoting/demoting of Sysops and Bureaucrats, you can also allow a user to operate as a 'bot', meaning their edits do not show up on recent changes.